A Mets trade with a one-of-kind bad ending

On December 7, 2011, the New York Mets traded outfielder Angel Pagan to the San Francisco Giants for a pair of players. Outfielder Andres Torres and pitcher Ramon Ramirez were the two pieces that put on the blue and orange for the 2012 campaign.

Neither would have nearly the same impact as Pagan did. Torres patrolled center field regularly for the club in 2012 but hit an incredibly light .230. Ramirez did get into 63.2 innings while delivering an unremarkable 4.24 ERA.

The trade was rather inconsequential for New York and a helpful one for the Giants who went on to win the 2012 World Series. Beyond these facts you may already remember          there’s one other unexpected part of this deal I never realized.

The Mets gained nothing from this trade and the Giants got it all back

Both Torres and Ramirez were free agents after the 2012 season. Each already well into their MLB careers and near the end, they both chose the same team to play for in 2013: the Giants.           

That’s right. For all of the negotiating. All of the behind-the-scenes chatter. The hiring of movers. The notifying your mailman. The updating of insurance policies. All of the trash that goes into uprooting your life and going somewhere else. Each and every piece of it was reversed a year later.

This trade was a rare instance of complete and utter take backsies. The Giants landed a quality outfielder in Pagan for two veteran players. Both slingshot right back to San Francisco after spending only a single year in the Big Apple.

The fact that the Giants ended up picking those pieces back up all over again isn’t exactly the most eventful moment in the franchise’s storied lifespan. Torres was a part-time player in 2013 and a .250 hitter. His major league career was finished after the season was through. Ramirez was even less significant, tossing just 5.2 innings for Giants in 2013 before only throwing one more a year later with the Baltimore Orioles before his MLB career concluded.

Was this the most impactful Mets trade in recent franchise history? Hardly. But it did have one of the stranger results with all three players singing “California here we come, right back where we started from" only after a year of being all “New York, New York.”